In mintty some symbols used by powerline-shell are not rendered

[wildmichael]

I am using powerline-shell in Cygwin with the mintty terminal emulator. The problem is that none of the patched fonts contains all of the symbols used by powerline-shell. Mintty seems to have its issues with font substitution/fallback. While it does appear to substitute some of the symbols, it doesn't do it for all. Maybe because it doesn't find a suitable replacement in a monospace font...

Any ways, attached is a test HTML test.html.gz that shows some (all?) of the symbols used by powerline-shell for each of the patched fonts. As a fallback font the styling uses the LastResort font to force the browser not to fall back onto an arbitrary font that provides the symbol. As can be seen, none of the fonts provides glyphs for u+2446 and u+2332 that you use for a SVN and fossil repositories, respectively. The composite for bzr also fails to render due to the lack of the combining diamond glyph u+20DF. Same goes for stashed state, u+2398. Etc. pp.

I realize none of this is the fault of powerline-shell per se. It is caused by the interaction of fonts not having the glyphs and mintty not substituting as liberally as other terminal emulators do. Hence this is more of a question. Could an alternative set of symbols be offered/configured? Just seeing tofu is not very helpful and beats the purpose of powerline-shell. I'll also follow up with the mintty developers. They are already aware that there are font substitution problems, but this being Windows the MS API's are of course behaving quite differently than the *NIX systems.

[stuaxo]

Hi @themiwi would it be possible to report this to mintty?

I would, but don't understand the issue enough - I got as far as testing things and seeing they didn't work + found this bug

https://github.com/mintty/mintty/issues

[wildmichael]

Thanks, I'll do. For me, I just hacked the sources to use different symbols (where I cared...)